Dita Kraus

Holocaust survivor and ‘Librarian of Auschwitz' who gave hope to other children in the death camp

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H G Wells made his name predicting where mankind might be going, but it was his explanation of where we had been that gave a group of children in Auschwitz the hope that they might have a future.

A Short History of the World, published in 1922 and translated into Czech, was one of barely a dozen books curated by the 14-year-old Dita Kraus for her fellow prisoners. As a library, it was tiny; as a small piece of joy amid such despair, it was immense.

At Auschwitz she worked in the "kinderblock", block 31, run by a charismatic Jewish youth leader called Fredy Hirsch who had persuaded the camp commandant to create a daycare centre for children. Older children, Kraus among them, became his assistants and were given chores such as cleaning or cooking.

Kraus was asked to manage the small library of books that had been found in the luggage of arrivals. Though Wells's history was the only title she could later recall, other survivors remembered an atlas, a work by Sigmund Freud and a collection of stories by the Czech science fiction writer Karel Čapek.